Silicon Collar excerpt: Uber driver

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Tony DiBenedetto lives a few miles from us, but the experiment he describes could easily have been done from our street or a growing number of streets around the world. DiBenedetto, CEO of Tribridge, an IT systems integrator, realized he was using his Chevy Volt less than 5% of the time.

"I started taking Uber, and I start journaling about every single trip. I did it for about 30 days, and I drew a number of conclusions that led me to sell my car.”

Next, he looked for opportunities across his company:

“I took a look at our company's T&E and our people are renting a ton of cars. So I got my whole exec team to stop renting cars, then I rolled Uber out to the whole company, and we've documented the savings. We're saving 35% on T&E because we're not using rental cars and taxis."

After the hundreds of Uber rides he has taken, I asked him if he had drawn a demographic profile of the drivers:

"Most of them were not ex-taxi drivers. I would say 50% of the people who drove me in that first month had a second job. It was everything from young kids just trying to make it, to retired people, or people who were bored. One of my drivers was a helicopter pilot who for two weeks a month worked for the big oil companies in New Orleans. The other two weeks he just didn't see himself doing nothing. He's ex-military, and so he picked up the Uber thing to basically not be bored. I thought that was interesting. The retired people were all pretty similar: They wanted to get out of the house or make a little extra cash. I'd say 5% to 10% were in between jobs. There's no question that it fills a gap in employment. It allows for people to run their little businesses, and still do Uber as a supplement. All the drivers love the flexibility."